I thought I'd close out 2011 with 5 guiding principles for companies striving to be more competitive and agile over the next 12-36 months. I'd love to hear your comments (and plans) related to these! You can comment below or reach me on Twitter at @danielselman. Happy Christmas! Have a fun, compassionate, healthy and prosperous 2012!

1. Exploit Historical Data

Enterprises amass huge volumes of transactional and event data. They use distributed batch processing to aggregate and classify historical data to gain insight and advantage. In some industries sophisticated predictive models are built from the historical data. Batch processing is typically very compute intensive and must typically complete in hours.

2. React in Time

To complement the historical data computed using batch the enterprise reacts to events. Millisecond, or sub-millisecond, response times are required to ensure enterprises stay ahead of competitors. In many cases simplifying algorithmic assumptions are made to speed computation, compared to more exact batch techniques. The next night's batch run may therefore change the enterprise's world view...

Monitoring dashboards provide humans with the insight they need to remain in control and to supplement the automated system with human intelligence.

Events tell us something about the state of the world at time T. What was believed to be true at time T may not be true at time T+1. How reliable are our event streams?

3. Make Consistent, High-Quality Decisions

Decisions made by the enterprise must be of high-quality and consistent across multiple touch-points: streams, processes, batch, and transaction processing. Decisions and processes emit events. Subject Matter Experts need sophisticated and scalable testing and simulation tools to ensure rules function as designed.

4. Performance, Performance, Performance

Both vertical and horizontal scalability are critical due to the volumes of data to be processed. Competitive advantage is based on crunching more data, faster, using more sophisticated algorithms, producing smarter outcomes. Elastic compute grids are required to easily scale and meet peak loads.

5. Move from Segments to Customers

Enterprises need to make the right decision for customer Daniel Selman, not the right decision for white-males living in Brittany, France. Every customer has an unique historical context, and personalized rules, and these must be taken into account during decision making. The enterprise context for a single customer may be spread across an Event Processing Network, CRM system, process instances, transactional databases and batch results. Customers may benefit from a distributed authoring experience to author and manage their own rules, on their own devices.

Business rules has proved itself to be a key enabler of the agile enterprise. One of our major challenges for 2012 is how to best expose business rules (which often implement decisions) to a range of IT and business systems in an efficient, intuitive and safe manner. Decisions do not operate in a silo, they are often triggered by events or processes, make use of data managed by Master Data Management and may kick off processes or fire events. Making good decisions sometimes means referring to past outcomes, expressed as predictive models.

Simultaneously I am seeing an explosion in the number of rules (Big Rules) as well as the size of the simulation datasets (Big Data). 5 years ago a customer with 10K rules was pushing the envelope. Today we have customers requiring 5M rules and running simulations against 400M records. Many of the use cases for extreme numbers of rules are driven by requirements for mass-personalization: a bank has 20M customers and each customer has 10 personalization rules. We move from a few very large rulesets (e.g. mortgage approval) to millions of very small rulesets. Some of these rulesets may be very personal indeed, perhaps even running on a personal device.

The good news however is that we have already made significant progress!

At IBM, WebSphere Operational Decision Management (WODM) is part of the BPM division and we've worked very hard to make rules easier to invoke from processes. Customers can start-small, embedding a few dozen rules in their processes and then scale-up to enterprise BRMS as needed.

Using the just announced WODM v75 release, customers can govern transactional and event rules using a single repository and governance tools.

We built a Support Pack that integrates SPSS predictive models and JRules so that customers can easily invoke predictive models from rules or convert PMML into Decision Trees.

A Support Pack for WebSphere Business Monitor provides easy monitoring of decisions using a powerful dashboard, providing real-time IT and business insight.

We've done a huge amount of work for the z platform to help our customers move their business logic out of CICS/COBOL applications and into reusable and agile decision services.

In fact, every week I get inquiries from customers and product teams who are integrating business rules into their solutions: Master Data Management, Smarter Cities, Smarter Government, Adaptive Case Management, Health, Stream processing... the possibilities and opportunities are enormous!

Join us on March 16 @ 11:00am ET/ 8:00am PT to hear from Brett Stineman (IBM WebSphere Product Marketing Manager) discuss when to lead with BPM, Decision Management or both, the right approach is essential to lower implementation cost, effort and risk.

Attend this lively 60-minute webcast and learn:

An overview of IBM WebSphere process improvement technologies, including when they are best used together

Typical business-driven process problems and use cases

How a flexible approach to process improvement provides more precision and agility in adapting to changing requirements and market demands